Butter: Salted or unsalted

Bill Daley, Tribune Newspapers

Q: When a recipe calls for butter, especially in baking recipes, should salted or unsalted be used?

—Ann Fox, Winnetka

Q: Becky Wahlund, test kitchen director for Land O'Lakes, the Minnesota-based butter cooperative, makes a good point: If the recipe specifies a specific butter, salted or unsalted, use what's called for. Otherwise, it's your choice, she said.

"We know butter can be interchanged,'' said Wahlund. "It's the preference of the user or what happens to be the refrigerator."

You'll want unsalted butter if you're going for what Wahlund describes as a "bit of that cultured note" the unsalted butter can provide in a recipe. This would be important in making shortbread, say, where butter is the predominate flavor. Wahlund says that cultured note will get lost if there are other, stronger, flavors in the recipe like chocolate, cinnamon or peanut butter.

Nick Malgieri, the New York City-based pastry chef, teacher and author of "Bake!: Essential Techniques for Perfect Baking," takes a less flexible view on switching between the butters.

"Unsalted butter is always used for baking unless salted butter is (rarely) specifically called for," he wrote in an e-mail from Zurich. "Salted butter may contain varying amounts of salt even in the same brand and from brand to brand so it's unreliable to count on the salt in the butter being the right amount for a pastry dough for example. Salted butter especially wouldn't work in cake batters that contain little salt or in buttercream."